Getting painted

We have had an hour or so of pounding, pounding rain every day for the past couple weeks so today we start painting the house. Seriously.

George (our contractor & not to be confused with family-member-of-the-same-name) has been MIA for a while, but he called last night. His girlfriend got back from a visit home (Japan) late last week & then they got married so now he is ready to work. Actually, what he said on the phone last night was "now that I am whole again I can start getting things done".

Many moons ago, I started shopping for a contractor to finish the back room (now that light filled space at the back of the house, but in those days a rank, concrete hole that a previous homeowner had sort of just stuck on). I could not believe what came out of the yellow pages. I think my favorite was the guy who brought his mother; she took notes & drove him around because he had problems with his drivers license. Between them they had three teeth that I could see. There were several other candidates, all variations on this theme.

George was different. First of all, he had no trouble with the ocean of dog that surges around our house. & they had no trouble with him. This is a huge plus. There were also a thousand small things that I couldn't put my finger on, that I gradually came to understand. He was from Manchester, CT so he sounded like a normal person & not some DukesofHazzard wannabe. He measured things while he talked about completely different things (I took this to mean he had a brain that could multi-task, also my step-father does this so it was another reflection of home). & not once ever, did he bring up Terry Schiavo (remember poor Terry Schiavo? This all happened in those weeks, if you want you can look it up); this was a bigger relief than it should have been because we had just had some work done to fix our water pump & put in a new septic system & all the workmen that entails so I had really had enough of this particular topic. I had (have!) a strong & specific view on this issue & was sick to my eyeballs of hearing what their pastors had to say about activist judges.

Anyway, we found George & he has been our contractor ever since. He squeezes our small jobs in around his other work (other contractor jobs but also yoga classes-he's the instructor). & today, he will start replacing the bad boards outside the house & we will get painted!

What color are we painting, you ask? Why precisely the same color everything is right now. Well, not precisely. I think we managed to match the color the old paint has faded to.

Useless alphabet

Today I had to unload horse feed. This is an exercise equal only to Missionaries & Cannibals if you actually had to do all that rowing yourself, but more because there are always extra scenarios. I will tell you that story another day because today, while working my way back & forth through gates and pastures I started a Useless Alphabet:

Appaloosa are arrogant - accept it, asshole.
Bad dogs. Bad bad bad. Boy-o-boy are you bad dogs.
Chickens choose corn on the cob
Donkeys do know what does & does not belong BUT donkeys don't care
Emus are easily excited.
Forget fun & fascinating vacations, all our funds are forfeited for Feed!

Now, someone else do G.

Big birds

Today A confirmed that Cleo is blind in his right eye (yes, his. It turns out, I had them exactly wrong, so now they are CleoPatton & Antonelle). It is hard to say when it happened, if it was even here. When they arrived, he was in the worse shape & didn't move around much for several days. This is how the people looking after him determined "his feet hurt".

The two birds had been enclosed in a smallish pen & fed on a diet of dog food, which I have been reliably informed is the typical diet for backyard emus. This explains why there aren't so very many.

Now I need to decide how to treat it. Not that I think there is a treatment, exactly. The eye is foggy & food placed on that side is ignored. His depth perception is terrible; often Cleo will jab Antonelle trying to grab a leaf more than an inch or two from her head. I hope he doesn't blind her. I am not sure our large animal vet wants to treat large birds; horses are more her line.

Aside from not seeing to the right, he seems happy enough. As happy as a large bird with a small brain can be. We were weeding today & pulled several of the Asteraceae they love &, as usual, stems full of leaves fell at their feet, but only by accident did they stand on them to make pulling the leaves any easier. & only briefly. This is probably what happened to the dinosaurs, too.

Travel plans

I am in the process of arranging to go to CT the last week of December. Yes, I know it's July, but I need to do all the ordinary planning & cope with coverage for the animals (boarding, sitters-do you know how hard it is to find someone who will pet-sit a pair of emu?).

When I started thinking on these lines last month (yes, JUNE), I suggested to A that I go up a few days ahead of him. Classes end 12/10, but exams continue to 12/19. & then there is always some last-minute ass-hole trying to negotiate a better grade (I have so much respect for people who cut classes, don't hand in homework & then pitch temper tantrums because they are .5 from the grade they want & Prof won't cut them some slack). At the time A said he thought that sounded good. Now he is sure he would never agree to that.

There is no getting A to sit & make a decision about when he might be ready to go. He thinks more than 48 hours notice for anything at all is excessive. His whole family is just as bad. Last year, his mother was astonished that we had plans for a particular day that couldn't be changed less than four days before (the day was New Years). She was clearly frustrated that I wasn't prepared to alter my plans to squeeze in a visit from them & their houseguest. She also tried to grill me on what those plans were, to find gaps that might work. I don't know if the Inuit really do have 100's of words for 'snow', but I can tell you Romanians have no word for 'none of your beeswax'.

& so, here I am trying to purchase airline tickets , but I don't know what day or what airport or who he might want to see or how long we are staying or anything & the person who really will be inconvenienced by whatever wrong choice I make is much too absorbed with "more important things to dedicate any brain cycles to than something that won't happen for 6 months".

I wish I knew what he DID agree to, maybe I want that.

A painting, a book

I have been reading Strapless by Deborah Davis, about the famous Madame portrait by John Singer Sargent & it referenced (as being painted just before) a painting belonging to the MFA Boston that I have always admired: The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit.

I was not surprised to learn that it is indeed a portrait of four different children, ages 4-14 who were the daughters (plural) of this family. What did surprise me was that nowhere in the blurb at MFA (as recorded on-line) or in the book Strapless did anyone mention what I thought was obvious: the pose is intended to show the child distancing herself as she ages. The youngest child is front & center. The next, off to the side. The next at the back facing forward & the eldest, next to the previous, but facing away.



I admit to having done no research on this. I guess I thought it was such a no-brainer that it ought to be in the little black typed card on the wall, next to the painting itself.

What has this to do with useless ranching? Nothing at all.